Alison Kinney

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • My Book: HOOD
  • Essays & Articles
  • About Alison
  • Books Blog
  • Events
  • Contact

The Uses of Orphans

The New Inquiry (a Best American Essays 2016 Notable Essay)
(
shared by The Rumpus)

Many people expect real orphans to behave like literary orphans: like portable anti-alienation devices for the people who, so to speak, take us in. This expectation is embedded in institutional rhetoric and policy. We’re expected to diversify communities, once we’ve assimilated; to educate others about cultures from which we’ve been sundered; to provide uncritical love, respect, and endorsement, not just to our adoptive families, but also to our adoptive nations, absolving them of wars, injustice, and inequality. This is not a non-story.

Back to Essays & Stories

Fritz Eichenberg, illustration from Wuthering Heights

Blog at WordPress.com.